Subscribe

Next SA fibre wave on the way, says IS

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 29 Jan 2015
The next big fibre wave will hit as soon as all the checkboxes are ticked and neighbourhoods have access to high-speed broadband over fibre, says IS's Greg Montjoie.
The next big fibre wave will hit as soon as all the checkboxes are ticked and neighbourhoods have access to high-speed broadband over fibre, says IS's Greg Montjoie.

While industry watchers have painted an apathetic picture of the outlook for landscape-changing fibre in SA in the short-term, the ingenuity of communities willing to step up to the plate bodes well.

This is according to local communications services provider Internet Solutions (IS), which has been working with Vumatel - the telecoms start-up contracted to deploy fibre in Parkhurst - since last year.

Greg Montjoie, executive of carrier and connectivity at IS, says 2014 "will undoubtedly go down in the history books as the year in which fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) became a reality for South Africans".

In what he says is a "clever twist" in SA's fibre story, Montjoie notes the uptake and deployments the country has started to see in this space were largely driven by a community that took matters into their own hands, putting out a tender to deploy fibre in their neighbourhood.

"The community that started the movement is Parkhurst, a leafy suburb north of Johannesburg, and the success of their project is now being mirrored in neighbourhoods across the province, all wanting a piece of the FTTH pie."

For the Parkhurst deployment, IS has been working with Vumatel and other partners, providing the beachhead environment, where the fibre pulls into one single point. "From there, clients leverage off our existing provisioning interfaces. [This] gives them access to a single interface to deploy broadband services, irrespective of who the underlying provider is," explains Montjoie.

Corporate cause

In terms of corporate fibre (fibre to malls and business precincts), IS says uptake has been significant.

With software-defined networks becoming a reality, Montjoie says it is important clients have the ability to turn bandwidth on at a layer two level - and on demand. "[Fibre] will start to take the effort away from Internet service providers in terms of managing the network, giving them the agility to focus on clients."

But fibre is about more than just providing broadband Internet services, notes Montjoie. "The capacities fibre allows, also offers opportunities within the education and healthcare sectors in and around those 'fibrehoods'."

IS believes fibre will uplift SA more than any other technology that came before it. "The entire industry is watching these neighbourhood fibre deployments very closely. I have no doubt they will become incredibly popular and this in itself will define how we move forward," says Montjoie.

"As soon as all the checkboxes are ticked and these neighbourhoods have access to true high-speed broadband over fibre, we will see the next big wave of fibre deployment in SA."

Share